


Sabaism

by Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee



Series: Shades of Water [2]
Category: The Hobbit RPF
Genre: Aftermath, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Heed the tags folks, M/M, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts, post-character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 23:04:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15592752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee/pseuds/Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee
Summary: It isn’t a conscious decision, the way he misses Aidan. It’s elemental, written into the chemistry of his bones like it’s been there all along, as if somehow it was inevitable and his body had always known that he would one day feel this way.This is an alternative ending for What The Water Gave Me, and can be considered a direct replacement for Chapter 28.





	Sabaism

**Author's Note:**

> Sabaism (n.) The worship of the stars
> 
>  
> 
> I have thought long and hard whether to share this, and in the end (with a little encouragement!) I've decided to go for it. I appreciate that the content isn't for everyone, though I can assure you there is no gore, only emotional pain. It's not angst for the sake of angst, either - if you read it, I think you'll understand. 
> 
> I would like to take the opportunity here to say that IN NO WAY do I wish this to be reality, wish any harm to anyone named in this fic, and I don't enjoy seeing or making the boys suffer. I don't know where this came from, but it came all the same. It made me cry for a good four days, and there is a good reason why it is the ALTERNATIVE ending - because I love them to be happy, too!
> 
> It is only a work of fiction, and the characters are, at this point, essentially OC's with familiar faces and a couple of personality traits. I like to hope that anyone who has got this far with this story will appreciate that, and read it for what it is.  
> Thanks, guys. 
> 
>  
> 
> This was entirely inspired by listening to some old M83 tracks (Let Men Burn Stars, I Guess I'm Floating and On A White Lake, Near A Green Mountain.) If you are a particular sucker for punishment, go put them on in the background. 
> 
>  
> 
> For Silva-13, for always encouraging the heartache.

“Dean?”

 

The white wall opposite swims back into focus, and Dean blinks hard. He frowns at the slight dirty scuff in the paint just above the skirting board and imagines a muddy trouser hem, perhaps the top of a boot just catching along the woodwork.

 

He tries not to worry that he has no idea how long he’s been zoned out. It happens all the time now - or so he’s told. Friends catching him with glassed eyes and the stillness of freezing air. He can’t help it, catching the wisp of a thought and following the thread of it until it leads him out of the room and momentarily, so blissfully, out of reality.

 

They rouse him, hands trying to say what they can’t bring themselves to. A nod and a tight smile.

 

Sympathy in motion.

 

He tries harder each time, throws himself back into the conversation to spare them his awkwardness, but he almost wishes he never had to snap out of it because when he does it’s like waking up and he feels that its as if he’s trying to pinpoint a dream.

 

He finds himself sitting in cafés nursing coffees he doesn’t remember ordering, cradling full cups for hours until they are cold between his hands. People talk all around him but their conversations buzz past his ears as if they speak in a different language.

 

He skirts the park. Hands jammed in pockets and laughter floating over the wide green playing field to where he walks with what looks like purpose along the perimeter, the sound catching him by surprise in its recent unfamiliarity. Kids play games in a secret language of clapping hands and slapping knees. Couples kiss and joke and bury themselves in mutual digital isolation with their heads on each other’s laps.

 

He watches them in a way he’d watch a new species, dumbfounded at the easy flow of love; the simple acts of everyday togetherness, the sting in the audacity of their taking it for granted.

 

He wanders a lot; sometimes on purpose, but other times he will find himself far, far from home with no recollection of having left; sitting on the banks of the freeway and watching traffic race past to an unnamed destination, wondering if he could ever outrun all this, if he should just wave down a car and leave without so much as a backwards glance.

 

He coughs and straightens up in his seat, shuffling the stack of his feet against the beige carpet and almost apologetically meeting the gaze of the woman waiting patiently in the corner.

 

As if she can sense his impending question, she leans forward and gently prompts, “You were telling me about Aidan?”

 

“Right. Right, yeah, sorry. I was just...” He settles back in the chair and swallows hard against the lump in his throat. “Aidan… Aidan died two days later.”

 

He says it quickly, methodically, like he’s taught himself to. Like he’s discussing a bank loan, or the disappointment of weather.

_Stick to the facts, Deano; don’t dwell_.

 

He digs his fingernails into the flesh of his palm, his hands knotted tightly in his lap.

 

“His body just… shut down. They said it was from the hypothermia, that his system couldn’t handle it even though they got him warmed up. I can go into it if you like, I… I understand most of it. But - it doesn’t make any difference to why I’m here, does it?”

 

She shakes her head and tells him he can talk about whatever he feels is important.

 

He inspects his knuckles, the lined skin slowly whitening as he grips his hands harder together and turns her words over in his head.

_What’s important_.

 

And what is it, exactly, that is important?

 

Is it important to tell her about the way Dean knew, he just _knew_ as soon as he set foot in the hospital the next day that something was wrong?

 

Is it important that he never got to see what colour Aidan’s eyes were that morning, or the next morning, or any morning ever after?

 

That he clung on for two more days despite the massive damage that his body had sustained, while it was failing him that he wouldn’t let go until all hope was lost and Dean wound his hands through his hair and told him that he didn’t have to fight any more?

 

“He fell asleep and he never woke up,” Dean says.

 

He is always stunned by how small and insignificant it sounds. A few throwaway words to describe the crux of Dean’s new existence.

 

He breathes out hard, shaky and too fast but he’s used to this, used to telling this story; although the words are still jagged and unfamiliar in his mouth and his stomach clenches tightly every time he does.

 

“I think he knew. I think he knew and he made himself wake up and talk to me because he didn’t want me to worry.” He plants his right boot on the inside of his left again; comfort. Aidan did this too.

 

Aidan had done this too.

 

He lets the silence hang between them before he quietly continues.

 

“ _A chuisle mo chroí_ _._ That was the last thing he ever said to me. Do you know what that means?” Dean lets out a tiny, ironic laugh. “Pulse of my heart. Literally, that I was his heart beat, the thing keeping him alive.”

 

His eyes meet with hers and suddenly he’s desperate for someone to answer him, to tell him why; to give him some thread to hold on to, an explanation for why it’s fair that he is here and Aidan is not, for the staggering pain of Aidan’s absence and the horror and unfairness and relentlessness of it all. To tell him what he’s done to deserve this – all of it. To tell him why he couldn’t have gone too.

 

“Why couldn’t I be enough? Why wasn’t loving me just enough to keep it going?”

 

His hands open and he clutches tightly at the air as the first tears force their way out. He doesn’t even try to hold them back.

 

He isn’t just crying, he’s breaking; and his body folds in half as he lets out a long keening wail, his elbows slamming sharply into his thighs as his head comes to rest in his hands. His jaw is clenched tight, chin shaking as his sobs rock his body and it’s seconds before she’s with him, crouching over him in a warm, human gesture of closeness; one hand between his shoulder blades and the other pressing gently against his chest, right in the centre of his rib cage, as if to hold his heart in for him.

 

* * *

 

The rock sits up the slope, though from where he’s positioned it Dean can still glimpse the white lake between the trees. He’d wondered if he shouldn’t maybe give him a better view, but he knew this was where he belonged; the place where the first glancing rays of the morning sun touch the ground on clear days. He’d waited ages to find it, dutifully sleeping outside on a pine-needle mattress and waking before the dawn to be sure he’d got it right.

 

He’d tried not to look up on those long nights, grateful for the ceiling of branches above him shielding him from the stars he knows were sailing obliviously overhead; but they were there whether he wanted to look or not and he still hasn’t made up his mind if it will ever be a comfort. Without Aidan, any sense they’d once made is gone and Dean is lost in the chaos of their beauty; the map he once had revealed to him now shattered into a million pieces and only a shining impenetrable maze of memory and ache is left behind.

 

He’d found it himself, the heavy grey slab of schist. A polished and proper headstone wouldn’t be right. Aidan would have wanted it this way, something torn from the land, his land; solid and inconspicuous and belonging.

 

It fits.

 

From a distance it might not look like much though undoubtedly it’s something to admire, majestic and strong in the way it sits in its surroundings, but Dean knows that the real beauty can only be seen when you look closer, so much closer; and he often finds himself sitting just inches from the stone, tracing the fine patterns and textures with his eyes for hours; all the fine beauty of this monument the result of the most immense pressure, its very existence a function of the sheer destructive force of nature, and he knows that Aidan would smile at the irony.

 

He’d scattered Aidan’s ashes on the ground, but by now he’s probably a part of the forest and whenever Dean wants to find him he never looks down, only up, at the fabric of life growing indifferently around him.

 

Dean closes his eyes, and wonders if how he feels about Aidan dying is anything like it will be when the sun finally implodes.

 

* * *

 

He’s learned to sit with the heaviness of his own company, although he’s never really alone.

 

He hears him.

 

A yelp of laughter echoing down the newly-green valley. The crunch of his boots on dry wood, twigs cracking beneath his feet; the crack of an axe splitting morning air. Sometimes he’d swear he can smell him too, the unmistakable scent of diesel and violet and mint gum and smoke; of home.

 

He presses the instep of his boots together in a neat line and draws his heels in towards himself, his kneecaps making a jagged peak in the air like a miniature mirror of the mountains that enclose he and Aidan. He hugs them with his arms, bending himself over until his forehead rests on their crests, and finally he lets out the shaky breath he’s been holding.

 

He doesn’t mean to say it but it’s instinctual, now that they’re alone and he doesn’t have to hide.

 

“Aidan,” he gasps.

 

It’s barely a sound, but as soon as it’s out the floodgates are open and he’s glad that he’s sitting because he knows he wouldn’t be able to hold himself up. He doesn’t know if he is empty or full, so painfully aware of the way his body constricts around the other man’s absence.

 

He feels his jeans dampening beneath his chin as he sobs, but there’s no point in moving. He folds in on himself around the hole that Aidan has left behind the same way a flower curls closed when the sun goes down.

 

Sometimes he shouts as loud as he can into the wild, other times he is incapable of moving, thinking, of making a noise; but mostly it’s the same snatches of thought that accompany him and drift round and round his head.

 

_I can’t do this without you._

_I miss you._

_Please come back._

 

That word, the one he finds himself thinking more than any other, as if somehow he could say it enough times and make it happen.

 

 _Please_.

 

* * *

 

 

Dean presses himself harder against the cold stone at his back and tries to imagine a warm, lean body there instead, draped around him like his own shadow. They did this sometimes, sitting high up the hill with their spines pressed awkwardly together, somehow the act of looking away and feeling each other’s ribs inflating slowly against each other, the sensation of their perfectly synchronised breaths sliding silently away into their kingdom more intimate than if they’d been sitting face to face.

 

He’s been sitting here too long, but he hasn’t yet found an easy way to make himself leave. Every time he tells himself it will just be for a short while but inevitably it’s hours later that he emerges on the shore, half-blinded with grief and fatigue.

 

He’d be the stone himself if he could. He’d sit here with Aidan and let the seasons change around him, let years slide past and the world forget about the both of them; but he’s made a promise to live and so reluctantly he unfolds his aching limbs and takes a deep, shuddering breath through his mouth because his nose is blocked from crying.

 

His lips are swollen and red because he bites them too hard, too often; but he doesn’t really care so much about the way he looks these days. He scrubs at his cheeks with his palms but all he succeeds in doing is to move salt water and mucus across his face. He gives it one last swipe with his sleeve, leaving silver-white trails of sorrow across the material before he stands and tries to blink away the tears but it’s pointless, because they keep coming anyway.

 

Most days everything Dean touches ends up tasting like the sea.

 

He rests his hand against the stone, dragging his thumb along the top edge.

 

“I’ll be back in a bit. I’ve got some stuff to do in town, a… a few days, maybe? But I’ll see you soon, ok?” he says.

 

He presses two fingers against his lips and brushes them against the rough surface before he quickly turns and walks away, his footsteps soft and quiet on the loamy ground.

_Don’t look back,_ he reminds himself.

 

He can’t ever look back.

 

* * *

 

When he goes, it’s both nothing like he’d thought and everything like he’d imagined. The huddle of weather-beaten houses sits determined in the face of the relentless grey rain which blows sideways for the three days Dean allows himself to visit. He finds them on the edge of the church yard, or at least the markers of men that once lived, the bones of Aidan’s brother lost to the water that churns endlessly at the base of the cliffs beyond.

 

Graham had told him where to look, though his offer of his coming along was politely but forcefully declined. Dean needs to do this alone. He sits with them too, and he tells them his story as rain trails off his hood and down his face. He isn’t sure whether they want to hear it but it feels right that they should know.

 

In the end, Dean rips a ring from his own finger and hurls it over the drop into the hungry graphite waves. He’d have given it to Aidan if things had been different, and now it’s here; and somehow it brings them all together. A family that never got to be. A fragment of a dream never brought to life.

 

* * *

 

It isn’t a conscious decision, the way he misses Aidan. It’s elemental, written into the chemistry of his bones like it’s been there all along; as if somehow it was inevitable and his body had always known that he would one day feel this way, the rot deep inside waiting to bloom and devouring Dean as he’s known himself until even he can’t recognise the man in the mirror any more.

 

He carries Aidan with him like a heavy void inside, settled somewhere deep between his ribs and his stomach like a stone. He wears him outside too, Aidan’s clothes too big on his newly-thinner frame; his bracelets, the hard outline of his lighter in Dean’s back pocket. The word _breakdown_ has been mentioned more than once and some days Dean is sure they aren’t far off the mark, but there is no reason for him to give these things up.

 

It’s never less than painful to remember, but it’s more that he doesn’t want to forget.

 

He’s so scared of forgetting.

 

Not the big things, but the small. The idea of waking up one day and not being able to remember the exact shape of the shells of Aidan’s ears, all delicate angles to Dean’s own curved pair, terrifies him.

The feeling of his thumb gliding across Dean’s knuckles, backward and forward as if he always had to be in contact with him, anchoring them together.

The precise weight of his body in the bed next to Dean, the exact amount Dean always rolled in towards the dip he’d leave behind in the morning.

The way he made the word sound like the first time he’d said it every time he’d spoken Dean’s name.

 

The cruelty of it is that he now understands with absolute clarity what it is that Aidan had been feeling all these years, and the one person that he might have been able to turn to help him is not only gone but the reason for his own agony.

 

He asks himself over and over – _did I do enough? Could I have done anything more?_ Guilt sharpens its claws each night while he sleeps and tears into him anew every morning, but he refuses to fall into that trap.

He won’t let himself walk the path that led to Aidan’s own downfall, and he knows Aidan would be so angry with him for even entertaining the idea. 

 

He’s looked so many times at the lake in a way he knows he shouldn’t.

 

Sometimes he wonders if he tried to drown himself if Aidan would appear and rescue him, if their time together would begin all over again like it somehow never happened; but he’s sad, not delusional, and the idea is one that he only lets comfort him for a second at a time before he flings it aside on the growing pile of fantasies that accumulate in the wake of Aidan’s passing.

 

He knows that even thinking about ending it should be the cause for alarm bells, that he should get up and run away and not stop until he’s gotten help, but who can really dig him out of this?

 

The question he’s asked himself time and time again only has one answer, but it doesn’t make it any less painful to accept. Perhaps sliding under the water, stones in his pockets and boots left neatly on the shore would seem like a relief; but in the end it’s not relief he’s looking for and so the water remains undisturbed and resolutely silent, no help in providing any other kind of solution.

 

* * *

 

Nobody had known what to say to him. They’d exhausted all their sympathy after Lee had died, but this time they just glance between themselves with a kind of mutual guilt and pity. He wonders if they’ll avoid him now. If somehow they’ll decide it’s him that’s the source of bad luck. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad for them if he was handling it the same way as he had done a year ago, but it’s not the same. He’s not the same. He wouldn’t want to be.

 

He knows that some of them thinks that he wasn’t with Aidan long enough to justify the very depth of his sadness but time is a relative concept to Dean now. It passes like wildfire, or not at all; marked and measured by the distant happy boom of fireworks, in the murmurations of birds and the first flurry of snowflakes that settle on his eyelashes while he sits in the cold, letting it hurt.

 

He might not believe it himself - the sheer intensity of their connection - if it hadn’t happened to him; but he’s long since given up on expecting other people to understand just how glorious Aidan was and in how many ways he made Dean glorious too.

 

The way people tread around him makes him feel so tired, looking at him with those carefully carved expressions of concern as if he might break at any moment. He wishes they could just accept this as his new normality.

It’s different this time, his grief.

It’s quieter, more enduring, more profound.

It burns like an ember in the pit of his soul; a glowering amber knot inside that threatens to erupt white-hot and without warning with just the tiniest addition of fuel that comes in the form of memories or déjà vu.

 

Dark hair curling just the right way at the base of a neck.

 

The new guy that serves at the DIY store, long work-worn fingers in an all-too familiar shade of tanned gold, brushing his own as they hand him his change.

 

A laugh, more a yelp than a chuckle. One that rips through his chest and threatens to split him in two.

 

He looks at these people with swimming eyes as they meet his gaze, watches them wondering to themselves how a man becomes a shipwreck; but he could never find the words to explain even if he tried instead of getting away from them as fast as his legs will carry him.

 

It’s not just people, though.

 

The door of his workshop, where the ghost of a note tucked there by Aidan’s hand lives.

 

The smell of a wood stove, the way they tick as they cool in the dark.

 

Helicopters overhead.

 

Apples.

 

The creak of leather boots.

 

Water.

 

Everything. He cannot escape it.

 

Endless fucking nights and endless fucking days that plague him and haunt him and leave him dashed into a thousand hopeless pieces again and again.

 

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t say much. He speaks when he’s spoken to, and he’s certainly pleasant when he’s in company and engages just enough for people to leave him be; but he never really feels like he is _talking,_ not the way _they_ talked; words and ideas passing between them for hours and hours, both nothing and everything all at once.

 

He wears happiness lightly.

 

The rare things that make him laugh warm him like a superficial heat, leaving him cold and shivering as soon as he withdraws from the source. He knows those close to him worry about the way he is, about all the time he spends out in the woods; but they don’t understand when he tries to tell them that it isn’t _for_ Aidan, it’s because of him.

 

Richard thinks he’s going mad, but Dean knows better.

 

 _After all,_ he remembers with the slightest smile tugging at his mouth. _Sometimes it’s alright to let yourself break a bit._ He’s not afraid if other people don’t want to see it.

 

_That’s their problem, not mine._

_As long as it isn’t forever._  

 

* * *

 

 

Life becomes a tolerable kind of monotony. He dreams, he swallows the disappointment of waking, he dresses. He works - when he feels like it; and he eats alone in the evenings in the small house he rents on the other side of town. Richard had told him he should stay. Begged, really; but he can’t. Not now.

 

His studio remains in Richard’s yard though, and they see each other as often as Dean needs. The careful balance between them has shifted too, and though it’s his own method of self-preservation to hold Richard at arm’s length Dean knows how lucky he is once again to have him standing solidly in his corner.

 

* * *

 

 

It was never a question whether he’d fulfil Aidan’s request or not. The nucleus of the idea took hold before Aidan had even taken his last breath and Dean nurtured it like a seed, letting it grow until he couldn’t ignore it any longer.

 

Richard rubs his temples in despair and says he’s obsessed, but Dean prefers to think of it as driven. It’s taken an unbelievable amount of time to wade through the logistics; signing the land over, getting an access track cut in - but it doesn’t frighten him to play the long game.

 

Time is really all he has.

 

* * *

 

He has little inclination to dwell on the chrysalis of sorrow that he casts off while he works. His body emerges as new from the wreckage as the cabin does. Their synchronised growth is meticulous and slow; the barest of bones fleshed out by Dean’s hands until he has laid a solid foundation for them both, a tenuous structure thrown up; supports and carefully fitted joints ensuring that neither will ever fall down again. His muscles grow stronger and harder, but unlike the cabin it’s not his external façade that Dean is trying to build.

 

His lips crack and the skin of his back burns and peels as he works on the roof. Rain blurs his vision and his teeth chatter violently as he desperately tries to fix windows in the sodden face of a winter storm.

He falls into exhausted sleep on a half-boarded floor while the cabin inches itself into being, his shattered body wrapped tightly in inherited, well-worn blankets, not so much to keep himself warm as to safeguard the fragile spark he’s found burning inside him; a bright, jagged nick of sensation that penetrates the numbness like sunlight flooding through a keyhole.

 

Slowly, slowly, something grows.

 

* * *

 

He strokes his hand along the counter to remove the last of the shavings and carefully lays down the plane he’s been holding, the skin of his palm warm and stinging from working at it all afternoon.

 

His eyes dart left to right as if he might find something else still incomplete, but it is done.

 

Part of him wishes he could have reached this point months ago, but he is nothing if not a perfectionist in his craft and he could have never forgiven himself if he hadn’t taken all the time he’d needed to ensure that his version is an exact replica of its predecessor, faithful to the last detail. And if he’s honest with himself? Perhaps in his way he’s been putting it off, afraid of the inevitable question – what now?

 

Until this moment the cabin has felt uninhabited, empty, despite the constant ghostly soundtrack of laughter and muffled sounds that spew from his phone.

 

He’d found the video by accident. He hadn’t even remembered making it, but there it was.

 

Aidan captured unaware and forever fixed for five perfect minutes in time. Dean’s feet poke up into the bottom of the frame as Aidan putters around by the sink, turning carefully with two full mugs in his hand and his tongue poked out in concentration between his teeth, setting them down again and jumping on the bed when he realises he’s being filmed. The camera records soft sheets and happy noises until Dean’s hand gropes into focus and the screen cuts to black, but Dean remembers what happened next like it was yesterday and no matter how much it hurts he plays it more often than he knows he ought to.

 

It had taken him days to work up the courage to watch it the first time, but it’s become a comforting loop in the background while he’s worked out here, almost as if they’ve done it together.

 

He knows it will never be enough, this whisper of their life united, of what they had. It’s like trying to convince himself that he can be content with Aidan’s shadow when all he wants is his heat and the solid wall of his body and to devour him, to fuse themselves together so they would never have to be apart this way, so this chasm between them would never have to exist.

 

He used to wish they’d had so much more time together, but little by little he’s learned to be grateful for what they did have. In the beginning he focused so much on all the time they’d wasted but now he cherishes every one of their minutes together, turning them over in his mind like a box of priceless treasures.

 

He’d almost wondered if he’d made a mistake, got the design wrong or in having to move the cabin further round the shore to a more stable footing the magic had got lost; but the very act of putting the last piece in place has unlocked the door that has been closed to him for so long and suddenly Aidan is right there, in every knot in the wood and every hand-struck nail. The air is thick with him, gold and dusty and wonderful, and Dean can’t help but laugh because it’s better than he’d ever dared hope it would be.

 

“Hello my love,” he whispers.

 

He holds his hand out to collect dazzling flecks that gather already in the quiet space, the movement sending them scattering away in currents of chaotic slow-motion. This is it, the moment he has been waiting years for; the point on which something unnameable turns around for him.

 

He has no idea how long he stands frozen in the centre of the room, held in the tight embrace of the building that envelopes him, but by the time he takes a giddy step backward and a deep, restorative breath – as if it’s the first he’s ever taken - the trees are dressed in midnight blue shadows that steal through the windows and lengthen themselves along the bare walls.

 

The warm evening air is resonant with the slow click of cicadas and the faint repetitive lap of the water on the pebbled shore as he steps out into the gathering dusk. The lock is smooth and silent where it once scraped and jammed, but Dean knows it’s only a matter of time until even that subtle difference is lost to the wind and rain, and the cabin will be faithful in its entirety to Aidan and his dream.

 

He rests the flat of his palm against the door for just a second more before he pulls the grey plaid jacket tightly around him, tucking the key on its long leather cord around his neck until the cool metal rests against the skin of his chest.

 

His boots hammer on the stairs in a well-practiced rhythm. When Aidan followed behind him they could never take them slowly and it seems etched in the memory of his muscles to jog down them even now, relying on his feet to find their own way as he looks out across the wide expanse of the water before him.

 

As he hits the bottom step he stops and turns, pausing for a moment before he climbs back up, his slow pace betrayed by the way his heart races inside.

 

He strides along the deck until he’s sure he’s in the right spot, kneeling to tear at the newly-laid planks with his hands. The board cracks, green and splintering, and he prises it away, a crooked smile forming when he finds the space beneath that he has carved out with his subconscious.

 

“Here.”

 

He tugs the cord back over his head, coiling it in his palm and taking in his distorted reflection in the metal surface; a picture of fatigue and relief and still, underneath it all, the faintest flicker of hope.

 

“I’ll leave this here for you,” he says softly, rising to his feet and his smile widening to find the other corner of his mouth. “Just in case you need it.”

 

 

 


End file.
